Tom Hanks Turned Down Playing Walt Disney Until He Got a Call From Bob Iger
Tom Hanks portrayed iconic artist Walt Disney in the 2013 movie Saving Mr. Banks. But his initial instinct was to walk away from the project before a conversation with Disney head Bob Iger.
Why Tom Hanks initially didn’t want to play Walt Disney in ‘Saving Mr. Banks’
Hanks has built an impressive resume of biopics in his career, from Philadelphia to A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Although he was well aware of this reputation, when he was approached to play Walt Disney himself, he refused. Being Walt Disney would’ve been too much even for Hanks.
“The burden, you know. Honestly, the responsibility. I heard about it first from Tony. I think he’s head of physical production at Disney. But he and I executive produced and worked and created From The Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, The Pacific. We had done a lot of stuff. So he was over there. We have lunch every now and again. He says, ‘You’ve got to play Walt Disney in this movie we have.’ And I said, ‘Geez, who needs that pressure,’” Hanks said in a 2013 interview with Collider.
But Hanks was so important for the role that Iger would personally talk to the star to get him on board.
“Then Bob Iger called me which, you know, he even said, ‘Look, this is not usually the way this works. I call you and say well, will you do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I haven’t read the screenplay,’” Hanks remembered.
After reading the screenplay, Hanks decided to do the role after all. Not only did he think it was a quality script, but the movie was showing a Walt Disney that Hanks had never seen before.
Tom Hanks considered playing Walt Disney some of the hardest work he’s done
Disney was difficult to pin down for Hanks. Being a child of the 60s, Hanks had grown up with the inventor, and considered him a significant part of his childhood.
“Walt Disney was as ubiquitous to my growing up as Elvis Presley and Smokey the Bear. We watched him every Sunday night on TV and he’d talk about Disneyland, but when I went there, that was like, ‘Oh my God, I’d died and gone to heaven’,” Hanks once told The New Daily.
But actually playing Disney was a different matter entirely than just watching him. Especially when the Walt Disney Hanks was trying to play was hidden in very specific interviews.
“It’s just the hardest work that is to be done. There’s a billion hours of video, of Walt performing as Walt Disney, being a great guy. But I found enough actual footage of him in interviews when he’d really like to be done with the subject,” Hanks once told the New York Times. “When he doesn’t want to talk about Fantasia again, because what he’s really here to do is show you the new animatronic birds that are going to be going into the Enchanted Tiki Room. When I could find him showing any legitimate kind of consternation, that was worth its weight in gold.”
Tom Hanks received blessing from Walt Disney’s daughter to do the movie
Hanks shared that Walt Disney’s family wasn’t exactly on the best of terms with Disney studios which created some concern for Hanks.
“The Disney family connection with Disney studios did not end well. When Roy Disney [Walt’s nephew] was still here, he was sort of creatively shunted aside but kept aboard for almost ceremonial reasons. Then eventually they left,” Hanks said.
But the Oscar-winner would meet up with one of Disney’s children, who seemed content with the film despite her family’s history with the studio.
“Not unlike the filmmakers who sent the script to the Walt Disney Company wondering if they were going to get a cease-and-desist order, we went to see Diane Disney [Walt’s daughter] wondering if she was going to say, ‘I don’t like this idea at all.’ But she wasn’t like that. Everybody got what it was about,” Hanks said.
